Type Tasting is an innovative type studio founded by Sarah Hyndman that delivers unique and entertaining events, talks and typography workshops. From newcomers to experts, audiences learn to communicate better and understand the psychology of type, through interactive and revelatory experiences with all of the senses. Our mission is to inspire everyone to find fonts fun and exciting.

Jellybeans and ‘Experimental’

The theme of Grafik’sLetterform Live this week was ‘Experimental’, and it was an exciting evening to be a part of. My aim for the evening was to bring a bit of ‘bonkers and magic’ at a time of so much anxiety. We filled the bar with jellybeans and asked the 130 audience members to guess each flavour from the style of the typeface on the label. If you weren’t at the event you can still take part in this experiment here.

I spoke about how amazing the human brain is for the skilful way it creates a ‘sub-programme’ to perform the complex task of reading, which your subconscious performs automatically. Your eyes simply glance over a series of marks in a huge array of shapes and sizes and—as if by magic—stories, ideas, memories, songs, smells are conjured up right there in your mind.

The members of the audience were also invited to take part in ‘font sniffing’ experiments, these are a part of an ongoing project to map smells to typefaces to create a type/smell etymology system. They took part in an experiment to induce grapheme-smell synaesthesia, experienced how a typeface can nudge their experiences to change how something smells or how much they will enjoy it. We ended with the kiki bouba effect, first noticed in the 1920s, which maps the sound of words to visual shapes, and can be used as a type classification system and is worth considering when naming products.

Font sniffing experiments.

“Think about the fresh and zingy smell of lime; take a deep, imaginary breath as you think about the citrus smell and see how it’s mirrored in the shape of the letterforms…” Inducing grapheme-smell synaesthesia.

Fantastic line up of speakers, it was such an interesting evening and Peter’s talk blew me away.